Screaming Females: Saturday, Nov. 16

How to grow a punk band: play basements, record with Steve Albini, impress Garbage.

If there were a “right way” to make it as a punk band,
Screaming Females would be a prime example. Being from New Brunswick,
N.J.—a bona fide Mesopotamia of the East Coast DIY scene—certainly
helps, but there’s more to it than the magic in the city’s water.

Lying somewhere near
the intersection of Sleater-Kinney’s riot-grrrl caterwauling, Dinosaur
Jr.’s Marshall-stack meltdowns and the twisted surf-pop sensibilities of
the Pixies, you’ll find the sound of restless punk kids who have done
their homework. If Screaming Females were a football team, Michael
Azerrad’s essential 2001 tome, Our Band Could Be Your Life, would
be their playbook. As much as the Internet has shifted the indie ethos
away from what made the ’80s underground rock documented in that book so
industrious and fruitful, the important lesson in making it out of
basements in blighted New Jersey college towns remains the same: play
loud, play fast, get in the van.

“Touring really hard,
working really hard—that’s always been the way we’ve maintained
visibility,” says singer-guitarist Marissa Paternoster. “Getting to
shows on time and not pretending you don’t care is really important when
you’ve dedicated your lives to being in a band.”

It also helps when Steve Albini—In Utero
producer and grand architect of the alt-rock era’s ubiquitous
quiet-loud-quiet sound—is still just some dude in Chicago that will mix
the music of any band that knocks on his studio’s door. Just practice
your ass off and show up with cash. By 2012, with four records and
hundreds of shows under their belt, Screaming Females felt they were
finally tight enough to make the call.

“We just called him
and made an appointment,” Paternoster says. “He was really nice. There
were a couple times he let us crash at the studio while we were passing
through Chicago, and he made us dinner at 3 in the morning.”

The resulting effort, 2012’s Ugly,
pairs Albini’s engineering trademarks—tight, punchy percussion and
crushing low end—with bouncy melodies and Paternoster’s incendiary
fretwork. The record received praise from Spin, Rolling Stone
and Pitchfork. And so began the band’s ascent from the basement to
proper rock venues. While friends’ bands remained in a holding pattern
back home, Screaming Females were sharing the stage with radio-ready
alt-rock staples like Dead Weather, Arctic Monkeys and Paternoster’s
childhood favorite, Garbage.

“It felt like a very
natural process of moving from a basement to an art space to a club,”
Paternoster says. “We end up opening for someone famous like Garbage—the
first rock band I ever really loved back when I was 13—and we see it as
an opportunity to sound huge. We’ve really wanted to sound like this
three-headed monster, this posse with really strong characters.”

Fortunately for
Portland, Paternoster and company will be bringing their full-throttle
performance to a space small enough to enjoy the ear-splitting volume up
close and personal. With a home-brewed EP, Chalk Tape, fresh off
the press and a new full-length’s worth of songs in the set alongside
it, the explosive glory of Screaming Females is almost guaranteed to
blow a speaker or two.